Microsoft officially released a public Beta of Exchange 2010 which was formerly code named ‘Exchange 14”. I was already blinded by the features that Exchange 2009 provided – Unified Messaging being the best of the many and now we have Exchange 2010 in the pipeline. There are so many improvements in this version that I can’t decide which ones to highlight and talk about first. The product claims to achieve high levels of reliability with greater flexibility, enhanced user experiences and increased protection for business communications.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) has been scaled out to support Internet Explorer – 7 and 8, Firefox 3 and Safari 3. Users will no longer be restricted to using Internet Explorer. OWA has been further improved to provide a web user with all the functionality of Outlook desktop client. Also, a new feature of conversation view has been added greatly reducing mailbox clutter.

Voice Mail Preview is another feature that deserves applause. OWA and Outlook 2010 support voice mail previews. Exchange 2010 automatically generates text based preview of a voice mail message received. Not sure how accurate this is going to be but the concept itself is worth it.

Users will be able to create and moderate their own Distribution Groups and can also decide who they want their Calendar and Contacts shared with.

Ever got bounce backs after sending emails with large attachments or accidently sent a personal email to everyone in your company? Now you need not worry about that. MailTips is a new feature added up which prompts you before you send a message.

Message Tracking and Delivery Reports has been improvised in Exchange 2010 – works well inside the Exchange Organization and federated servers.

No more Administrator privileges required to scan or search other mailboxes in the organization to meet compliance. Authorized users can perform MultiMailbox Searches without the use of administrative rights.

Self service via Exchange Control Panel (ECP) is now made available to the end-user. This means that a user can now update their personal details in their account which earlier required a help desk call or ticket.

Database portability and multiple options for high availability were already made available in Exchange 2009. These have been further improved in Exchange 2010 and also open possibilities of reducing the operations costs. Database Availability Groups now gives redundant mail stores with continuous replication. Database-level Failover gives automatic recovery and the I/O optimizations make Exchange 2010 better suited for SATA drives.

These are just some of the powerful features that have been released in the Beta. We may be having a few more added to these in the final specimen. Overall the new version of Exchange looks very promising and exciting.